Gen X is the only good generation
OK, I don’t believe that headline, but it got your attention, and that’s the secret hiding in plain sight when it comes to essays about generations. They get people to click. Do they reveal great truths and penetrating insight? Deep down, you already know the answer, but keep reading to find out why.
When I published an essay about raising kids Gen X, I honestly had no idea it would be the first thing I published on Substack that would find a wide audience. (I still think the time I outsmarted a bird who flew inside our house is underrated but maybe that’s because I bested an animal CAPABLE OF FLIGHT.) In retrospect, I should have known I might be onto something. Writing about generations is catnip on any platform that has comments. In response to my post, I was praised while also being called retarded. And Substack is one of the nicer neighborhoods on the internet.
Most of the comments I received were positive. I’m going to share some of those first because in life we should always make the haters get in line.
I read every Substack comment. Whereas YouTube comments are like staring straight into the sun while someone punches you in the face, Substack comments are good. When I started to see critical or angry comments, I knew I could spend every free moment of my life in a running comment battle, or I could respond later, which is what I am doing. I will not lay on my deathbed wishing I had spent more time on the internet arguing with strangers.
I did respond to the comment below. In fairness, I didn’t know I was arguing until after my first reply. My response was absurd but also true, which is generally what you can expect around here.
I stand by this. I would have said, “Please don’t ruin the internet” to any potential internet-ruiners, if I had attended the “Should we ruin the internet?” meeting.
Alas…
I have a rule about not replying to comments that demand a laundry list of responses. What happens is you write something long and thoughtful, and the other person ignores it all and demands more answers that move you further away from your original position, and before you know it you are making arguments you don’t even care about just for that sweet dopamine hit. It all ends with you being called a Nazi. The One Thing Rule served me well during the Facebook Wars of 2015, and I will use it here. My response is that I think the writer of this comment and I are largely in agreement about how crummy the Internet has become and I offer this previous newsletter as some shred of proof.
Not everyone who is Gen X voted for him, and to be fair, he has yet to declare himself Supreme All-Time Best Just The Greatest Ruler of America. But more Gen X voters did vote for him this time around. I’m guessing someone like Nate Silver could give you a better answer than me on why. Fact: there has never been a Gen X president. Which I think explains a lot. [LOOKS AT AMERICA DISAPPROVINGLY]
I am going to respond to one thing and totally ignore being called retarded by someone who edited their comment but did not edit out the word retarded. Looking back, I wish I had not used garden hose because it is a Gen X cliche, and had I thought hard enough I could have come up with something more original. In my defense, it’s possible I cannot think of anything more original because I drank a lot of water from the garden hose as a kid.
Latchkey necessarily doesn’t imply instability. For my family, it meant mom was at work, and we had to get dinner started, set the table and get our homework done or we couldn’t watch Miami Vice later with dad.
I’m sorry my response wasn’t more serious. This comment obviously deserves a proper answer that delves deep into the implications of living in a consumer society. Let’s give this another try: [RUSSIAN ACCENT] In country without consumers, country consumes you.
The truth about generations
A couple years ago, I had an idea to write an essay about how there is no such thing as generations, which would have made everyone mad because 15 percent1 of all web traffic comes from articles about generations. “Generations” are just narratives about age groups that have broken through in our culture and lots of people were like “yeah, whatever, that works.”
What we call generations are the shared family, technological, and media experiences of some large group of people, probably from the middle and upper class, which later met and did nostalgia-as-bonding while drinking light domestic beers, probably at somewhere like a college, and who then went onto positions of influence where they needed stories to tell, probably like somewhere in Hollywood, journalism, marketing or the meme mines of West Virginia.
The garden hose is a cliche that broke through. You know what didn’t? Playing video games in the basement. Gen X invented that. But the Millennials get mocked for it. I don’t know why. But I still know the Konami Code. Up, down, up, down … real ones know the rest. I imagine any trait that makes the youth look bad will find takers because it explains “kids today” in a way that absolves older generations from blame when the real explanation for young people is that they’re young and don’t know anything and are grappling with living in a world that was not of their creation. I can still remember Boomers thriving in this incredibly complex and sprawling massively technical high-skilled world and when 17-year-old Gen Xers didn’t grasp it all immediately the Boomers were like, “Slackers.”
In conclusion, generations are fake, talking about them is great for clicks, and no one likes the Boomers. If you’re a Boomer, you probably think this is not fair. If you’re a Millennial, you probably can’t believe you just read a whole essay that wasn’t about you. If you’re a Gen Z … it doesn’t matter, this isn’t a video. They’ll never see it. Gen X isn’t perfect, but our narrative offers up some positive attributes. Maybe the best thing we can do is quietly encourage members of all generations to drink deep from life’s garden hose.
And next time I need more traffic to this newsletter, I’m writing a passionate defense of the Baby Boomer generation.
If you didn’t read the original post, check out: We’re raising the kids Gen X. If you’d like to read something totally different, check out The Ohio Connection is Too Big to Ignore.
Or more. Possibly 100 percent.
Haters gonna hate. We’re not in charge because parents of gen x didn’t have enough of us. Can we get some credit for saving the planet??? Ughhhh, gag me with a spoon.
Ah dear Stephen. With the talk of water softeners and disinfected water supplies. The lad has never heard of well water, it would seem. Or that some folks may have not have had a whole house water softening system. “Hey Culligan man!”.
But saddest of all, he doesn’t know how hoses work. When one turns off the water supply to a hose water remains in the hose Stephen. And that water sits, in a tube made of the rubber that won the Cold War, and it grows things. Little tiny things that would give you nightmares if you understood them. But those things get dislodged and run through that tube of sustenance as soon as the water supply is engaged.
And we drank that shit.